Abstract

“What do you do?” is one of the first questions people ask when they meet. This paper uses survey and field experiments to measure what inferences people make from others’ occupations; to show that these inferences influence social interactions and network formation in a variety of different settings and in multi-dimensional ways; and to estimate people’s willingness to pay for more positive occupation-induced inferences. First, we show that an individual’s job strongly shapes perceptions of individual characteristics such as intelligence, honesty, compassion, motivation, and leadership ability—beyond pay and prestige. These perceptions are highly stable across individuals and elicitation strategies—and in many cases feature almost as much agreement as perceptions of pay. We also find that jobs influence others’ stated preferences over how they would interact with a person in a variety of economically meaningful contexts. This differential treatment is predicted by the inferences that others make about a person’s character based on their occupation. In a non-deceptive audit experiment on a large housing platform, we find that individuals with jobs signaling better traits are more likely to receive a response to an inquiry about a roommate listing. We estimate people’s willingness to pay for more positive occupation-induced inferences, and find that the social signals of jobs produce meaningful variation in occupations’ desirability beyond their compensation.

for information giovanna.tramontano@unibocconi.it